Dyconex supplies to the Brookhaven National Laboratory

Editor: Anke Schröter

Switzerland-based PCB-manufacturer Dyconex is providing HDI flex substrates for an upgrade to one of the instruments on the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) located at America's Brookhaven National Laboratory.

The new forward silicon vertex detector upgrade (FVTX) for the Pioneering High-Energy Nuclear Interaction Experiment (PHENIX) experiment is designed to detect particles from heavy ion and proton-proton collisions and determine the direction from which they arrive. The detector will house roughly 6500 square centimeters of silicon strip detectors comprising 1.1 million strips and 8640 custom integrated circuits.

Noise and signal timing are very important for the correct function of the detector and initial prototypes using Dyconex HDI flexes have met the demanding performance criteria during testing. Once the upgraded detector is operational scientists are hoping that the results will give new insights into the conditions moments after the big bang and in particular into the mysterious quark gluon plasma, a 4 trillion degree hot, perfect fluid created in ion collisions at RHIC.